marcelled pompadour and kiss her--and see
if she wouldn't turn out to be a human-being kind of a mother, after
all. He looked back and saw what a selfish, unfeeling young cub he had
always been; how he had always taken, and had given nothing in return
save a grudging obedience when he must, and a petty kind of deception
when he might.

"Bless her heart, she'd have got me that racer and never batted an eye
over the price of it," he groaned, and turned over with his face
hidden even from his bleak cave. "I was always kicking over little
things that don't amount to a whoop--and she was always handing out
everything I asked for and never getting a square deal in her life."
Then, to mark more definitely the change that was taking place in
Jack's soul, he added a question that a year before would have been
utterly impossible. "How do I know that dad ever gave her a square
deal, either? I never saw dad since I was a kid. She's proud as the
deuce--there must be some reason--"

Once full-formed in his mind, the conviction that he had been a poor
sort of a son to a mother whose life had held much bitterness grew and
flourished. He had called her cold and selfish; but after all, her
life was spent mostly in doing things for the betterment of others--as
she interpreted the word. Showy, yes; but Jack told himself now that
she certainly got away with it better than any woman he knew. And when
it came to being cold and selfish, it struck Jack forcibly that he had
been pretty much that way himself; that he had been just as fully
occupied in playing with life as his mother had been in messing around
trying to reform life. When he came to think of it, he could see that
a woman of Mrs. Singleton Corey's type might find it rather difficult
to manifest tenderness toward a husky young son who stood off from her
the way Jack had done. Judgment is, after all, a point of view, and
Jack's viewpoint was undergoing a radical change.

That very change added much to his misery, because it robbed him of
the comfort of pitying himself. He could do nothing now but pity his
mother. As he saw it now, the crime of lying to her about that
Sunday's frolic loomed blacker than the passive part he had played in
the tragedy of the night. He had lied to her and thought it a joke. He
had taken a car worth more than five thousand dollars--more than his
young hide was worth, he told himself now--and he had driven it
recklessly in the pursuit of fun that nauseat